Thursday, 7 February 2013

Death Metal and Horror

Death metal and
horror are closely related. In the past I have explored concepts such as the grotesqueandextremity and their relationship to the genre. This time I want to unpack horror in death
metal. Before proceeding, however, it is worthwhile to define, to clarify just
what I
mean by death metal and horror.

Death Metal

Death metal,
simply defined, is one of the genre offshoots of heavy metal known as extreme
metal. Extreme metal includes but is not limited to: black metal, grindcore,
sludge and certain types of doom and ambient metal. There are many sub genres
of death metal including old-school, Swedish, technical, melodic and brutal.
Furthermore there are more distant, third generation relations such as
deathcore which occupy a contested space within the genre (more on this below).

The defining musicological
elements of death metal are: fast tempos, disorienting time changes, low
tunings, chromaticism and what are known as guttural (low, grunted, shrieked,
shouted) vocals. While these elements may be similarly found in other genres
within metal what makes death metal distinct as a genre is its conceptual focus
on violence, horror and the grotesque.

Death metal
represents an extreme expression of the nihilism integral to punk and later
thrash. When these genres failed to produce legitimate shock value, death metal
went for the conceptual jugular. In a world of constant shocking visual news
via first broadcast television and later the infinite repetition of the
internet there is very little that disturbs the modern citizen for more than
enough time it takes to change the channel. Death metal ramps up the abject to
absurd levels taking horror to extremes. It creates a sonic and conceptual
hurricane of the grotesque and invites the listener to take part.

In my opinion
death metal has long ago exceeded its capacity to shock. Infinite repetition,
duration, appropriation and imitation have lessened its impact. Furthermore,
its innovators continue to age and either leave the “scene” or stay on,
continuing to compose and perform with varying levels of success. However,
newer groups, especially those within the subgenre known as technical death metal have found new
ways of expanding on musical complexity by combining it with conceptual complexity.

Groups such as
Obscura, Decrepit Birth and the Faceless take a speculative, science fiction
based approach finding horror in the unknown infinity of space and physics.
Gorguts famously plumbed the depths of the psyche, laying bare the total and
utter despair of depression to a cacophony of dissonance and non-standard
noise. Spawn of Possession encapsulate whole horror tropes within single
compositions exploring themes such as occult apocalypse, maniacal murderers and
child abuse.

To say that death
metal is without nuance or subtlety belies the understandable ignorance of a
novice listener. That said, the number of albums featuring covers and songs
about violating, molesting and abusing women tend to outnumber the more
intelligent articulations by a significant factor. The same can said though of
hip hop and if we were to take a cheeky leap, the horror of most contemporary
pop music and its insistence on status quo is as equally disturbing.

Horror

To me there are
two primary definitions of horror: emotional and the genre as it exists within
the creative arts. Better and more complete definitions exist all over the
internet, so I will instead focus on a personal interpretation. Etymologically,
the experience of horror is dread, veneration and religious awe. Over time it
comes to be associated with fear generally as well as a bodily trembling. Horror
is an emotion of which we have little to no control. It seizes and releases us
on its whim. Horror even while sharing similar properties to shock is far more
extreme in both intensity and duration. Shock requires exposition,
demonstration. Horror meanwhile can be communicated through implication,
indefinitely. Let me demonstrate via personal experience.

As a child I felt
the constant horror of my father’s mental illness. While certain actions of his
were shocking in the sense that they seemed instantaneous and irrational (tying
his left hand behind his back because it was “evil”, torching his car,
destroying all the furniture in the family home with one hand) it was the
lingering threat of his illness that carried the most weight for me long after
his institutionalization and so-called rehabilitation. For years I was afraid,
to the point of dread and trembling that he would suddenly appear on a street corner
or at the front door late at night for an encore. As a young adult I continued
to feel this horror as it mutated into a general feeling of disease and low
level fear whenever in public. It was not until many years later, living in Japan away from
that whole context that I realized I had lived with his horror for such a long
time.

Perhaps this
experience was what drew me to horror as a genre in the first place, a sort of
organic, internal homeopathic “treat like with like”. Horror had a resonance
for me, it was one of the few modes of artistic expression where I saw myself
accurately reflected. As I watched and read the accounts of others in horror,
being horrified and horrifying I slowly started to build the emotional and
psychological strategies required for decoupling the continued daily horror in
my life.

But now,
post-personal-horror, what keeps me affixed on the genre? Is it familiarity,
nostalgia? As I have said elsewhere one of the key attributes of horror as a
mode of artistic expression is that it is able to go to abject corporeal and
moral extremity without apology. Total destruction, annihilation is permitted
and to me this kind of active breaking down of concepts is a valuable
intellectual and emotional exercise. In this way it is not unlike S&M, it
is a consensual excursion into extremity and intensity not normally sanctioned
in typical social contexts. We all feel intensely
about certain things, for some people it is their preferences in whatever
field they operate (friends, behaviours, foods, animals), some people achieve
this intensity through courtship, sex and friendship as well as bullying,
animosity and anger. Whatever the case, as I have written elsewhere, extremity
and intensity are integral aspects of human existence and to me horror offers a
productive space for the exploration of extremity from fear to liberation.

The connection

Death metal has
long played with horror. Its obsession with nihilism and the abject means it
shares many of the same tropes. Artwork frequently makes use of sexualized,
dismembered corpses evoking both mass media representations of serial killers
and the existing repertoire of horror. Lyrics read like movie scripts and are
horrifyingly descriptive at times disgusting and offensive. Early death metal
was especially successful in conveying a horror aesthetic due to the limited
distribution of hard core horror and its relative lack of availability. Its
locrian melodies, reverb and blast beats evoked horrors that we all knew of but
had never experienced. Vocalists sounded like demons, beasts, people possessed.

However, over
time access to legendary horror texts and the ability to create video and mass
distribute it have significantly dulled the implied imaginary horror of death
metal. Furthermore, infinite repetition and imitation have seen once original
and terrifying ideas reduced to genre tropes readily available for re-assembly.
One expression of this is the genre offshoot known as deathcore. Taking the low
tunings and vocal techniques of death metal and utilizing typical horror
imagery combined with the emotional intensity and musical simplicity of
hardcore, deathcore willingly decontextualises and appropriates the
aforementioned tropes. Marketed toward a younger audience the capacity of death
metal to horrify is further disrupted.

By and large,
death metal no longer has the same gut level capacity to horrify. But this is
where the technical death metallers mentioned above begin to assert their
authority and start exploring horror in more literary, intellectual ways,
drawing on the traditions of horror as a rich and complex genre with a function
greater than simply shock. Musically, however, is it possible for death metal
to horrify anymore? I believe so. Possibility is found in the 2009-10 resurgence
of old school death metal (sometimes known as “wind tunnel death metal”) in the
vein of Teitanblood, Vulvark and Nocturnal Blood. These bands rearticulated the
horror and terror of death metal’s earliest incarnation in a way that was more
personally and psychologically risky and less fashionable combined with a less
defined production aesthetic. The overabundance of reverb, buzzy guitars and
rumbling drums make it sound like some sort of undead horror creature killing
mercilessly in the next room. Then there is Portal.

Perhaps the
greatest single encapsulation of horror and death metal aesthetics I have
experienced is Portal’s Seepia. By
taking production and compositional techniques to lateral extremes, this
Australian death metal band is able to open a portal of horror. Rhythmic and
melodic phrases twist and double back on themselves, emerge from and disappear
into a sonic maelstrom. From beginning to end the whole experience is
disorienting, bewildering and disturbing. And strangely, fascinating. There are
few opportunities for us to consensually enter into horror-scapes without denouement,
happy endings or plot twists. However, the unblinking relentlessness of Portal
is quite different to that found in voyeuristic animal cruelty documentaries,
snuff flicks and security camera footage. What makes Portal’s music such a
perfect articulation of horror is that it relies on the imagination and
interpretive capacity of the listener, there are few traditional hooks or
melodic anchors for orientation.

Visually, conceptually
and sonically death metal and horror have a tight interrelationship. I contend
that the capacity for death metal as defined along traditional musicological-genre
lines to horrify as significantly diminished as a result of the information
explosion provided by the internet. However, I also argue that death metal has
the full capacity to horrify in the original etymological sense of awe by
combining musical complexity with speculative fiction style conceptual
sophistication. This type of horror is about unraveling the artificial stasis
of everyday perception and causes awe through unsettling preconceptions around
identity and the physical universe. Finally, it is also my argument that death
metal as practiced only by a minority such as Portal retains the capacity to be
musicologically horrifying even as the genre as a whole becomes increasingly sanitized.
Death metal has yet to give up the ghost and I am sure that even when it does
it will likely fuck the ghost with a knife (or be fucked with a ghost knife).